A Concise History of the United States of America (2012)

22 A Concise History of the United States of America
Oxford geographer and friend Richard Hakluyt to produce a short work,
never made public, intended to persuade Elizabeth I to support Ralegh’s
New World colonization schemes. Hakluyt had, two years previously,
contributed to what was becoming a burgeoning literature on exploration
in the Americas with his Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of
America and the Islands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by
our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582).
Now, with Ralegh’s encouragement, he produced A Particular Discourse
Concerning Western Discoveries (1584), which was really a polemic for
English settlement in America.
In the context of an England concerned about both poverty and overpopulation,
Hakluyt’s argument struck a chord. England’s population
was on the increase in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: from 2.3
million in 1520,itroseto3.75 million in 1603 and to 5.2 million in 1690,
but its economy did not keep pace. Even when Hakluyt was writing, the ill
effects of this were already becoming evident. We “are grown more populous
than ever heretofore,” Hakluyt observed, so many, indeed, “that
they can hardly live one by another: nay, rather they are ready to eat
up one another.” The resultant unemployment, he concluded, produced
individuals who either threatened the social order or who were, at the
very least, “very burdensome to the common wealth.” Prone “to pilfering
and thieving and other lewdness, whereby all the prisons of the land are
daily pestered,” these social outcasts were destined either to “pine away”
or to be “miserably hanged.” Better by far, suggested Hakluyt, foreshadowing
what would become a standard defense of resettlement abroad,
that this surplus population be put to use in establishing and maintaining
English colonies in America. He had a fairly eclectic view of what skills
and trades might be considered surplus. Colonization, he argued, would
minister matter for all sorts and states of men to work upon: namely all several
kinds of artificers, husbandmen, seamen, merchants, soldiers, captains, physicians,
lawyers, divines, cosmographers, hydrographers, astronomers, historiographers,
yea old folks, lame persons, women, and young children by many
means which hereby shall still be ministered unto them, shall be kept from idleness,
and be made able by their own honest and easy labor to find themselves
without surcharging others.
Missing from Hakluyt’s list were the clergy, which was especially telling
given that he preceded his description of all other benefits to accrue from
colonization with the observation that it would, above all, serve “greatly
for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ whereunto the Princes of